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"The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in."

This is the biggest issue with AI. It is incredible when in the right hands (Senior devs who know good fundamentals and know how to code) but really bad when in wrong hands (Juniors with no fundamentals but they are made to believe that they know what they are doing).

So how do you design a harness that tries to grow the user? As in quiz the prompter in a way that forces them to reflect and improve?

And if they can do that- could they do it to themselves- going from a junior to a pro conversation?

You can't, as that removes the main value add of the AI.

I really disagree with that stance. It would be trivial to have it ask you questions about what it produced to ensure you understand. I’ve literally already done that several times.

From what I can tell, the value add for AI seems to be this behavior you're describing

But the value add being marketed is something entirely different, which is where the disconnect is coming in

"Understanding" someone else's solution is not comparable to solving it on your own, even if you can answer some questions about it. It builds extremely fragile surface-level understanding.

That struggle and repeated failure before finally connecting the dots on your own is how you build intuition and deep understanding.

Yes, all learning takes practice, it's the core of how our brain learns things. Any tool that eliminates the practice part means suboptimal, or zero, learning. Practice isn't just for physical tasks like riding a bike. All skills take practice, meaning repeated cycles of failures over a long time horizon.

We're way too far down this current UIUX disaster to pretend "sane defaults" is a nice-to-have.

You cannot speed run human learning. Investing time to read and absorb the material, repeatedly exercising and expanding your understanding, is the only path.

Not coincidentally, this is exactly how we train our AI.

Edit: but to answer your question, an AI harness can only emulate the best teaching methods. Learning is up to the human.

You don't understand math with a calculator; you use paper to understand math.

The same way you wouldn't let a junior electrician near a drill, he gets screwdrivers till he learns to be gentle.

AI should only be for people with existing knowledge of a trade.

My grandfather used to say 'any power tool can be a sander, if you use it wrong'.

you revoke their claude/chatgpt/copilot license

It's a catch-22 because juniors need AI to be competitive, but you need to do the grunt work yourself for a few years before you really build the skills necessary to advance. I can't imagine learning how to do math by simply reading a solution book.

>It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer

You still have standups, right?

I'd be questioning why at the very least the team lead/manager isn't questioning the lack of progress during those meetings and immediately requesting a more senior engineer help out.

Even before AI this was how it worked. Unless the junior engineer is being purposely secretive about lack of progress, which would have happened back then too, then this isn't an AI problem, it's a team culture one.

Yeah, I can’t imagine having something “weeks or months” late without intervention. That isn’t a failing of AI or the junior, that’s a failing on the team processes/manager/everyone else on the team.

This is the direction many engineers (seniors included) are facing if they mostly rely on AI. You lose your skills, you become detached. We will all become 'architects'.

I once (before ai) had a junior waste two months trying and failing to make a relatively simple change. As it turns out she it never occurred to her that she might want to copy the newly compiled executable ("it's the thing visual studio builds for you when you press build!" I had to explain this) to the server she was trying to run it on. So she never once managed to execute her changed code, which kept degrading as more and more changes accumulated trying to "fix" it

> “…they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. […] the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn.”

You’re describing a gap between those who would otherwise fail in their jobs sooner, and those who already know what to do. Sounds like there is a new paradigm for management, too.

I work at a workplace where the seniors use AI, and I am chastised for asking questions. I end up using the AI as a learning tool instead.